Conventional wisdom is that COVID-19 has caused thousands of deaths in the United States and nearly 1.5 million worldwide. This perception has been directly challenged by a study published by Johns Hopkins University on Sunday, November 22.
Luckily, a back-up copy remains on The Wayback Machine
Here’s a PDF of the article I made A closer look at U.S deaths due to COVID-19
President Donald Trump’s legal team has called for the Pennsylvania state Senate not to certify the election results, potentially opening up a path for the GOP to send their own electors to the Electoral College.
“You are the best constitutionally-invested entity to do that,” said Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis at a GOP-held event in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. “You have a variety of options in front of you.”
A majority of Canadians say they still agree with prolonged shutdowns and restrictions to combat the spread of the novel coronavirus, according to a new poll — though almost half say they are getting tired of those same precautions.
According to new polling from Ipsos, over seven out of 10 Canadians indicated support for a four-week shutdown of non-essential businesses in order to combat Canada’s growing numbers of new COVID-19 cases, while another 87 per cent say they intend to continue taking health precautions seriously until the spring.
Over 70 percent of the French believe that the controversial police operation on dismantling a migrant camp in central Paris earlier this week was justified, throwing their support behind law enforcement officers rather than the organizers of the migrants gathering, according to IFOP poll for the CNEWS news released on Friday.
The police operation was conducted on Monday evening and prompted an outcry in France, as videos and photos of police using violent methods against migrants were distributed on the Internet.
…“We can’t have our U.S. neighbours down in the states and everywhere else getting vaccines and Canada’s waiting two or three months,” Ford said, “as their economy starts taking off when they have the vaccine and we’re sitting back twiddling our thumbs, wondering when we’re going to get it.”
The federal government announced on Thursday it would now be holding weekly briefings on the progress of getting vaccines to Canada. One assumes that this is at least in part some damage control — or anticipatory damage control — to head off the vaccine angst that has reared its head in Canada this week.
That angst will not be magically dispelled either when vaccines start arriving on Canadian soil. As politicians and public health officials have been gingerly trying to explain, Canadians are going to get sorted into priority groups.
If we thought that Canadians were grumpy about seeing Americans and others getting ahead in line, wait until we see how they feel when they have to start standing behind their own fellow citizens in the queue. This will be a monumental exercise in managing public expectations and demands.
I don’t mind waiting for the vaccine if it is first allocated to the most vulnerable and frontline workers. I also have concern about potential hazards arising from their rushed development and for that reason will happily wait my turn for a jab.
But this is Justin Trudeau’s Canada so I won’t be at all surprised when our political class jumps the queue.
In the article, published on Thursday, the head of the Catholic Church shared with New York Times readers his hope that the highly visible coronavirus health crisis will awaken the people to other crises that they have been ignoring: hunger, violence and climate change. Then, he says, maybe we can rediscover our interconnectedness, overcome the traps of individualism and consumerism, and forge “a better, different, human future.”
Ontario is reporting a record number of new cases of COVID-19 but it comes as the province’s labs turned around more than 58,000 individual tests, pointing to a lower positivity percentage overall.
The Ministry of Health says that there were 1,855 new cases of the disease caused by the novel coronavirus confirmed on Thursday.
LILLEY: Small biz revolt shows need for smarter COVID regulations
Is a revolt beginning in Ontario, the lockdown zones of Toronto and Peel in particular?
Given the stories told by my Sun colleagues, it would appear yes.
“…I have just returned to Quebec. A month ago I was living in Thailand. I had been living abroad for almost three years, mainly in Asia. I have often been asked why. And although this answer could be answered in a thousand and one ways, the simplest is that I am well in Asia. It will always be one of my homes. People look like me and that feels good.
There is something extremely powerful about being in an environment where you blend in, where you don’t have to deal with micro (sometimes big) attacks. Daily for some or rare events for others, these micro-attacks accumulate, and in the end, it is heavy on the heart.”
Note this is Google translate but the meaning is clear. Should Quebecers all have plastic surgery to Asianize themselves for her sake or just fall over dead en masse to please her?
WASHINGTON—The former data and strategy director for President Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign says he has found enough evidence to suggest the election results could be “easily” turned to favor the current president.
“I have no confidence that Joe Biden is the deserved winner of this election, based on our findings,” Matt Braynard said in a Nov. 25 video. “He may have won, he may not have won. Trump may have lost, Trump may have been reelected.
“We just can’t know because of how bad this election system has operated.”
More government scientists have sought to frighten Britons over the prospect of getting too close to their loved ones at Christmas, including telling people that kissing their grandparents could deliver “a deadly dose” of coronavirus.
LONDON (Reuters) – Suspected North Korean hackers have tried to break into the systems of British drugmaker AstraZeneca in recent weeks, two people with knowledge of the matter told Reuters, as the company races to deploy its vaccine for the COVID-19 virus.
The hackers posed as recruiters on networking site LinkedIn and WhatsApp to approach AstraZeneca staff with fake job offers, the sources said. They then sent documents purporting to be job descriptions that were laced with malicious code designed to gain access to a victim’s computer.
Releated – ‘NO ONE who got the Oxford/AstraZeneca dose that had 90% success rate was aged over 55’
Oxford’s trial results this week suggested the vaccine is somewhere between 62 and 90 per cent effective, depending on the dosage people are given.
The jab turned out to be most effective among 2,741 volunteers accidentally only given a half-dose the first time they had the injection, followed by a full dose. But none of those were over 55, according to reports, meaning they didn’t represent the vulnerable group who will rely on the vaccine in the real world.
Scientists said claiming the vaccine could be 90 per cent effective for everyone based on that chance result was ‘shaky science’ and its manufacturer, AstraZeneca, yesterday announced it would carry out another clinical trial to confirm the results.
Looks like my writing in the pages of the Sun is being targeted by the federal Liberal government. The Prime Minister and Health Minister are speaking out to let you, dear reader, know that I’m fake and I’m dangerous. Better watch out.
The other week I began reporting on COVID-19 statistics released by the Alberta government. Health experts around the world had been warning people that those with underlying conditions were particularly vulnerable to the virus.
During Army Basic Training, decades ago, I was one of about a hundred recruits in our class. One hot summer day, we were called outside, to stand in formation, so that the commanding officer could address us. It was not a pleasant speech. Someone had tampered with the commander’s locked, glass-encased bulletin board. This was not discovered until several days later, when a copy of one of the commander’s letters, a letter that had been posted on the board, appeared in a national magazine. The letter had been the subject of published ridicule. It had warned recruits to stay away from a known house of ill repute. Since the house was in a remote rural location that had no street address, the only way to identify it was to describe the location, which amounted to a detailed, “how to get there” set of instructions.
The real history of election rigging and corruption in Democrat-controlled cities over the past century.
President Trump won the 2020 presidential election by a landslide of legal votes, and 73 million Trump voters will not allow this election to be stolen by widespread voter fraud. Stealing elections has been the rule rather than the exception in big cities run by Democrats throughout our history, and now it will end.
Rising inequality, lower mobility, contempt for the poor and widespread celibacy — we’re returning to the past
Today the richest 40 Americans have more wealth than the poorest 185 million Americans. The leading 100 landowners now own 40 million acres of American land, an area the size of New England. There has been a vast increase in American inequality since the mid-20th century, and Europe — though some way behind — is on a similar course.
These are among the alarming stats cited by Joel Kotkin’s The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, published earlier this year just as lockdown sped up some of the trends he chronicled: increased tech dominance, rising inequality between rich and poor, not just in wealth but in health, and record levels of loneliness (4,000 Japanese people die alone each week, he cheerfully informs us).
Kotkin is among a handful of thinkers warning about a cluster of related trends, including not just inequality but declining social mobility, rising levels of celibacy and a shrinking arena of political debate controlled by a small number of like-minded people.
